Crime should not pay. Ask Mencken.

               Something rather unusual happened in Uncle Jack's neighborhood this week which has left him  puzzled.  It seems that a 20-year-old Johns Hopkins student who lives just two blocks down the street from Uncle Jack's condo went forth from his house late at night, armed with a Samurai sword, to investigate a noise coming from his back yard.  According to police reports he there encountered an intruder who may or may not have been the same person who burglarized his house a few hours earlier and stole an xBox game-playing device.  Either with malice aforethought or in self-defense (only the student knows for sure at this point) he smote the intruder with his sword and inflicted a wound of sufficient gravity to cause the alleged burglar to bleed to death before he could receive medical treatment.  Police reported that the dead man was a 49-year-old resident of the neighborhood
who had just been released from jail three days earlier and who had over 20 previous convictions, mostly for burglary and car theft.
      Being the type of person often referred to as a "bleeding heart liberal" this unfortunate event gave Uncle Jack pause. While he can empathize with the student whose xBox had been purloined, perhaps by the same individual who was now prowling his back yard, he had to wonder if  the killing was legally or morally justifiable under the circumstances.
     The vast majority of those Baltimoreans who have commented on the incident in the pages of the Sun  in the past few days obviously do not share Uncle Jack's qualms.  In their view the victim got exactly what he deserved and they praised the student for defending his property.
     Driven by his own uncertainty Uncle Jack decided to turn for guidance to the Sage of Baltimore himself, H.L. Mencken, whose works he has been reading sporadically since he moved to Bawlmer in January.  He thought that surely Mencken would have an opinion and that it would be forceful and unambiguous.  He was right, as the following quotation from his book "Minority Report", published by Alfred Knopf in 1956, suggests:
    
Well, getting rid of criminals is a practical matter.  If psychiatry could really cure them, every rational man would be for it, if only as an easy way to dispose of a nuisance.  But as long as psychiatry remains mostly quackery we must contrive to get them into such a position that they can't do any further harm.  The one certain, swift and cheap way to deal with them is to put them to death.
    
     While Uncle Jack doubts that many of the Sun's
dwindling cohort of readers are acquainted with the writings of  the illustrious Mr. Mencken, it appears that his spirit lives on in Charm City.


      

                     H. L. Mencken at rest.